Day 26 of Coachella — better known as last Friday, the first third of the 12th annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio — was relatively run-of-the-mill. Two days after the fact I’m almost ready to declare it forgettable, despite a number of standout sets.

The Black Keys weren’t loud enough. Cee Lo Green didn’t get to play long enough. Odd Future weren’t awesomely swag enough. And since there was nothing special about yet another Kings of Leon set, the Chemical Brothers might as well have been the headliner — one which not many people stuck around to see. Thank goodness for the many improvements to the festival’s flow itself: not only did that help this desert paradise finally feel like Coachella again, such little surprises distracted us from realizing that Friday was one of the most mediocre days here ever.

Day 27 — Saturday, that is — was just the opposite: it probably isn’t Top 5, but it should wind up ranking very, very close, thanks largely to inspired performances from Mumford & Sons and Arcade Fire. Yet if Friday was just another day and Saturday was instant-classic Coachella, Day 28 (aka Sunday) was another animal altogether. The astonishingly megalomaniac performance Kanye West just gave a few hours ago – a brilliant conceptual complement to his extraordinary late-November release My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — is the sort of rare encounter that feels like music history in the making.

Largely that’s because of trying circumstances West in part created for himself. In the five years since his first Coachella appearance (more or less a midday cameo), the biggest ego in popular music has found himself both orphaned after the loss of his beloved mother and drowning in scalding hot water by generating irreparably bad press because of one remark or another — most publicly, his criticism of Bush just after Hurricane Katrina and his classless bum-rushing of Taylor Swift at the MTV video Music Awards two years ago. For at least a few months it seemed like his career had nose-dived, especially after his arena tour (with Lady Gaga opening!) was scrubbed almost as fast as it was announced.

This Coachella performance, then, was apt to be redemption after a lengthy dormancy that had been interrupted only by the occasional turn on television. With luck, it would be a reminder of what an uncommon talent this unabashed braggart genuinely is.

And that it was: I’ve never seen a more determined, powerfully gifted rap star in action — and I saw 2Pac and Biggie Smalls back in the day. He makes Lil Wayne seem positively puny, and though Eminem has as much fire, he lacks Kanye’s soulfulness, the spirituality inside the catharsis. (Plus, West is futuristic in his approach, not just fiercely ready to do verbal battle.)

But this sensational performance was all that and much more, a riveting and masterfully conceived production, complete with a modern dance troupe seemingly stolen from The Lion King, a ginormous Roman Greek frieze as metaphorical backdrop, plenty of fireworks to punctuate his trenchant rhymes, and a mostly empty stage that he nonetheless commanded with ease.

“Can we get much higher?” he asked in his opening number, “Dark Fantasy” — and indeed he could only have been higher had he been performing from atop the Coachella stage (where the night before 2,000 illuminated balls were packed and ready to rain down on the audience). As it was, West emerged on a crane lifted high over the heads of the audience sandwiched in between the stage and the soundboard.

Once he made his deliberately slow and self-aggrandizing ascent to the stage, however – as if he were Muhammad Ali about to take on George Foreman in Zaire — this overly maligned artist was unleashed, roaring his rants into the ether like a madman yelling obscenities at a lamppost. The vastness of his performance space was almost an attraction in itself, showering down pyrotechnic sparks at crucial moments — long enough for West to admire his handiwork – but then just as quickly, as the flames would ease up, the stage was suddenly more barren than it’s ever been in Indio.

It was psychologically complex hip-hop on a grandiose scale like no one in the genre has ever concocted – not even Jay-Z, who was so immensely impressive and entertaining at Coachella last year, he surely paved the way for this dazzling display. Heck, no one but Madonna and the lesser-celebrated Pet Shop Boys have dared put anything so over-the-top yet starkly magnetic on stage. At last, three years after his last Southern California appearance (an unbalanced one at Nokia Theatre), here is the fulfillment of every outrageous boast, every promise that he just might be the future of popular music. (I’m starting to think he really is.)

He also had mind enough to include virtually every song you’d ever want to hear from Kanye in a 90-minute performance-art piece, from crucial early staples like “Through the Wire,” “Jesus Walks” and the irresistible “Gold Digger” to recent Dark Fantasy material like “Power” and the self-incriminating “Runaway.”

And still … you’ll have to forgive me as I go quiet now.

I have tons more to say about Kanye’s performance — staring with the fact that, for all its stark white spaciousness on the stage, his hit-after-hit setlist was more approachable than most anything on the main stage other than Duran Duran. But as I try to type these words, I can barely keep my eyes from involuntarily closing. I’ll be back with much more to say about Kanye’s masterful tour de force, as well as blog entries about the rest of Day 3, including Duran Duran’s tremendously effective sunset appearance, the slow build of the National, the dance party that was Chromeo on the second stage, plus the Strokes, Nas & Damian Marley, and the eternally cool and compelling PJ Harvey.

But that’s all for discussion another time, either once I’ve made it safely home to O.C. or come later on Tuesday, when I reveal my annual Kill List highlighting the best of the best. Please bear with us – gotta sleep, pack and check out all very soon. We’ll back with fresh posts as soon as possible. In the meantime, enjoy the photos!

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